8-year-old boy pulled from lake after an hour under water

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(Portions of the video above were taken by Bill Gillam)

LAKE STEVENS — Witnesses say it was a picture perfect day on Lake Roesiger.

Lake Roesiger

A group of friends and family were swimming to and from a floating platform, when at about 2:20 p.m. something wrong.

“The kids have been doing this all the time. They’ve done it before; just this time when he went to try to climb on, he seemed to be having a rough time according to the witnesses and slipped. They didn’t see him come back up,” Snohomish County sheriff’s Lt. Rodney Rochon said.

When the boy failed to surface, friends jumped in to search for him. Others called 911.

“The first people on the scene were trying to do a surface search to locate the young man with no results but we did have a good position to look at,” Rochon said.

Divers went in and eventually found the boy at the bottom of the lake nearly an hour after he went under. He was taken to the hospital, and the sheriff’s office said his condition was not known.

“The first two divers that were on scene were deployed and they were able to recover an 8-year-old juvenile male in roughly 27 feet of water with a water temperature of 58 degrees,” Rochon said.

The dive team stressed that any time kids are in the water, there should be an adult whose only responsibility is to keep an eye on everyone. Better yet, they say, the best advice is to always have kids wear a life vest anytime they are close to or in the water.